Land of Coca Cola

from "When I Paint My Masterpiece" by Bob Dylan

Sailin' round the world in a dirty gondola
O, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola...

If there's one thing a globe-trotting American will never miss, it's the sugary bullshit from Atlanta. You can find it in every roadside stop on planet Earth (unfortunately). Maybe this omnipresence is fuel to the narrator's nostalgia, since it is the "land" that he misses, rather than the beverage.

Coke is a completely worthless beverage, hence the never-ending advertising blitz which insists on how necessary it is. Zizek has an interesting gibe on how Coke is the ultimate in "surplus value" enjoyment.

Also, gondolas are not ocean-going vessels, so you couldn't "sail around the world" in one.

Nuclear Energy

from a sculpture on the University of Chicago campus

At 56th Street and South Ellis, Henry Moore's outdoor sculpture commemorates the first controlled nuclear reaction, conducted in 1942 by Enrico Fermi's team, aka the Manhattan Project. Los Alamos and Hiroshima are sites of more famous nuclear events, but doomsday is technically a Chicago export.

Then again, maybe the harnessing of atomic power should not necessarily connote mankind's incipient suicide. After all, nuclear energy provides affordable and environmentally friendly electricity to millions (except when it doesn't). And political brinksmanship has so far not resulted in a mass extinction.

Moore's abstract, sensuous bronze conveys the ambiguity of the highly volatile subject material. Viewers are likely to imagine a mushroom cloud, or a human skull. A less ominous interpretation suggests itself if you climb onto the smooth, two-foot wide flume on the west-facing side. It's steep enough and long enough for a person to slide down, and turn a foreboding symbol of death into a children's playground.

Stones, and a Glass House

from Saved by Sin, dir. Peter Udoche

The aphorism is "Those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones." The narrator of this film, in the fabulously jocular yet intensely moral way the Nigerian film industry has of manipulating English, says "If you have the right to live in a glass house, I reserve the right to throw stones" (at 8:00).

He flips a cautionary phrase into a call for retaliation, and he might be addressing the entire West, grown fat from centuries of exploiting the world's resources. Economic barriers will no longer keep Nigeria in servitude.

Pot Black Kettle

from the popular idiom

The pot calls the kettle black.

Hypocrisy and an aversion to self-criticism are warned against in this familiar phrase. It derives from a poem in "Maxwell's Elementary Grammar" school book (copyright 1904):

"Oho!' said the pot to the kettle;
"You are dirty and ugly and black!
Sure no one would think you were metal,
Except when you're given a crack."

"Not so! not so! kettle said to the pot;
"'Tis your own dirty image you see;
For I am so clean -without blemish or blot-
That your blackness is mirrored in me."

It is unlikely that the poet/grammarian was familiar with Black Kettle, the Cheyenne chief who evaded Custer at the Sand Creek Massacre. Black Kettle may or may not have advocated an assimilationist attitude towards the encroaching United States, but as a treaty-signing Indian he has come to represent pragmatism and victimhood.

Black Kettle's people were massacred in the name of progress. The shameful Indian Wars are often explained as a "clash of cultures," where the civilized took the reins and destroyed the unenlightened. The United States' blackness was reflected by the indigenous kettle. Maybe a better name for the chief would be "Clean Kettle."

Motionless Revolvolution

from "Notebook from a Return to My Native Land" by Aimé Césaire

Césaire was a master of neologisms and in this anti-colonial call-to-arms he employs them to explore his own hybrid identity.

The proceedings get murky though when he gets to the end and the "immobile verrition" seems to house the author's political standpoint and his transformative linguistic subversions. The phrase has given English translators fits, because Césaire coined "verrition" from the Latin "verri": to sweep, scrape or scan. "Verre" is also the French for "glass," so you have an immobile, transparent, scraping, sweeping, scanning thing.

It's a bit of jump to include "revolution" into this phrase, although quite understandable given the context of the rest of the poem and the politics of its author. But it's not quite enough to substitute a fresh, ambiguous, violent word with a shopworn one like "revolution," so this translation opted for "revolvolution." Interesting enough, with a suggestion of double motion: physical and political.

"Motionless Revolvolution" only became problematic when Volvo co-opted the word for a marketing campaign.

Erroneous Content Reports

from Sarah Palin's Facebook

The AP and a number of subsequent media outlets are erroneously reporting the contents of the book.

Sarah Palin voices displeasure at the leak of her forthcoming memoir, Going Rogue. But it's not clear if the timing of the reports or their basis in fact are what draws her ire. Then again, if her book is full of lies, then this missive has found her a scapegoat.

Mermaid Run

November 14 event at Crissy Field, San Francisco

Much respect to the women who will gather and exercise and celebrate their health and their womanliness--but mermaids can't run. Because they don't have legs.

Gettin' Had in Texas

from L.A. Plays Itself

You gotta watch out for people around here, you know, you get had. You don't wanna get had, you come out of Texas, 'cause you're gettin' had in Texas.

At 3:00, the savvy Angeleno issues a word to the wise to the Texan neophyte. Indicating the gay cruisers on street corners, Fred warns Joey that some of these unscrupulous types will either rip him off or suck him off, or both.

The double-entendre reveals the assumption behind impromptu homosexual encounters in 1970s Los Angeles: that they're a zero-sum game, the opposite of making love.

You Quisling!

from Late Show with David Letterman, January 7, 1998

He just fired you! What do you mean he's...what is wrong with you...You quisling!

Norm MacDonald explains his firing from Saturday Night Live to David Letterman, who had left NBC years before and clearly has a bone to pick with some of the higher-ups of that network. MacDonald opts not to vent, to Letterman's clear consternation.

That's when Letterman calls MacDonald a "quisling," albeit in the self-mocking tone that the talk-show host has perfected. The term is interchangeable with "Benedict Arnold" and refers to a collaborationist Norwegian politician. Vidkun Quisling delivered his country to the Nazis, but MacDonald merely takes a career setback in stride.

Letterman is subtly recruiting the younger comedian for some kind of war against NBC, or against the establishment of media executives. If Letterman wanted only to call MacDonald a coward or a toady, he could have referenced "Lindbergh" or "Chamberlain" or someone like that. Instead he accuses the sanguine MacDonald of the ultimate betrayal.

For his part, MacDonald responds with drunken befuddlement (a tone that he has perfected). Whereas Letterman's comedy derives from a magisterial denigration of anyone who has the guts to sit on his couch, MacDonald wins laughs from his attitude of sheepish self-dismissal. The two funnymen are friendly antipodes for the whole exchange, even as the dictionary bit starts to expose Letterman's aggressive comparison (at 9:00).

A sage media critic reported that the only way Letterman's recent romantic scandal could destroy the man's career would be if his fellow-comedians chose to take him down. The jester after all is the second-most-powerful person in the court, after the king, and Letterman is the King of the Jesters.

Homegrown Terror

from Slate

Al-Qaida in Mesopotamia has become transformed...without the customary qualifications about its probable foreign leadership, into "a largely homegrown terrorist group." Ah, yes, homegrown: a reassuringly horticultural image with likable overtones of thrift and enterprise.

Christopher Hitchens quibbles with a New York Times description that may be the central confusion in America's Middle Eastern military adventure. Are these guys local or do we have an international conspiracy? Whatever the answer, and however the coalition (or what remains of it) responds to the problem, the jihadists are not like chile peppers or cabbage.

Hitchens later enjoys a gibe about the "overwhelmingly Catholic" Irish Republican Army.

White Win Flag

from Wrigley Field's flag-hoisting custom

Chip Caray, radio announcer, loves to say "It's white flag time at Wrigley!" when his Chicago Cubs win a game. Stadium functionaries hoist a white flag with a blue "W" to signify the victory. Interestingly, the color scheme was reversed in 1990 to conform with retired numbers on the same flagpole.

When the Cubs changed the flag's color to white, the landlubbers unwittingly made their victory sign a mark of surrender.

Sixties Wasn't a Safe Place

from Vice's Fashion Dos & Don'ts

The '60s wasn’t the safest place in the world for black people, but fashion-wise it couldn’t be more risk-free.

The magazine's beloved street fashion critiques have never shied from non-sequitur, but this one jumped out. In fashion and culture, people refer to "place" in a figurative manner: taking an idea to a "different place" can mean developing it uniquely. Here the sixties inexplicably make the jump from a time period to a historical milieu to a set of wardrobe choices.

Last Act of Götterdämmerung

from James Neugass' memoir War is Beautiful, p. 209

We may now call ourself Mars and let some slightly less bloody planet name itself The Earth. A black, dripping sun has arisen. All the stops in the organ of death have been pulled out, the last act of Götterdämmerung is upon us. In a blood-red sunset an earthquake topples and sets afire the pillars of Wotan's castle. The waters of the Rhine engulf the ruins. Lady Macbeth has incarnadined the multitudinous Mediterranean. Spain, the bad conscience and whipping boy of the Democracies, suffers first.

Neugass' long-lost memoir drew praise this year, even if its subject--international volunteers in the Spanish Civil War--seldom did. The author takes a crack at apocalyptic imagery from the front seat of the ambulance he drove. It's powerful, haunting, but the reference to Wagner's Ring Cycle is out of place.

The Nazis appropriated Norse mythology as part of their mystique, and these same Nazis provided crucial air support for Franco in his brutal conquest of Spain. History has verified Neugass's contention that Spain was the first chapter in a sustained threat to civilization--the American sounds the call several times in his memoir. But Götterdämmerung took place only in 1945, when the Thousand Year Reich fell. How was Neugass to know, in 1938, that he was invoking a fascist apocalypse, rather than a humanist one?

Incidentally, "incarnadine" means to turn red, lest readers detect another mixed metaphor. As far as I can tell the Lady Macbeth thing is solid.

Balance on Both Sides

from the New Yorker profile of baseball's Scott Boras

There’s a balance that’s needed in the growing of the game, and I provide the balance on one side, and you provide it on the other.

Superagent Boras addresses a congregation of his enemies: Major League Baseball's management and owners. Boras is widely known for helping to inflate players' salaries to astronomical sums.

But here he doesn't gloat, or even acknowledge any discrepancy between his players' interests and the owners'. Amiably, Boras claims that both parties individually "provide balance."

This bit of slick rhetoric obscures the countervailing forces at work. Who needs give and take when you've got two balances joining to form one supreme harmonious balance? In truth Boras provides a demand, then subtly suggests that he's getting a better offer from another team, at which point the owners shell out millions.

Lightning Couldn't Strike Twice

from a playoff preview on mlb.com

The weather powers-that-be have already swung and missed in a big way this postseason at Yankee Stadium, forecasting unplayable conditions for a game that eventually went 13 innings. If lightning could not strike twice for tonight's Game 6 of the American League Championship Series in the Bronx, both the Yankees and the Angels would be very pleased.

The cliché has it that unfortunate bolts of electricity are more or less random and their victims are evenly scattered. So when your friend's car is stolen, you can tell him that his house certainly won't be burglarized, because "lightning doesn't strike in the same place twice." Of course you would assume then that criminals were not targeting him.

But this report from NASA finds that lightning often does strike the same place twice, sometimes even at the same time. So as a metaphorical bromide to soothe an aggrieved person and as a weather-prediction theory, this stock phrase falls short.

Bryan Hoch twists the idiom into a prognostication. If lightning didn't strike the first time, then for Hoch it could "not strike twice." Of course, lightning doesn't strike in an almost infinite number of places, all the time, so instead of a fortuitous chain of events, this would just be a lack of rain, and some overcautious baseball umpires ("powers that be").

Other People's Cake

from Vice interview with Kato Kaelin

Bottom line, I think O.J. is the kind of guy that wants his cake and to eat a lot of cake from other people, too. He really does.

Most selfish people want only "to have their cake and eat it too." To his confidante Kaelin, O.J. Simpson is the type who wants to eat other people's cake, presumably after having finished off his own piece. He's doubly, postmodernly cursed with dissatisfaction. At least no one called him a "cake-eater."

Marie Antoinette could never have foreseen the greed and competitiveness that would inspire Simpson to murder his ex-wife, so dissatisfied was he with his own allotment of cake.

Torn Down from This Pedestal

from the NY Times Sunday Book Review

[The judge] sent her home to change her clothes, instructed her husband to use a tighter rein and told reporters that it upset him to see "women tearing themselves down from this pedestal."

Unnecessarily upgrading a thing's status is "putting it on a pedestal." But to be toppled from a pedestal suggests the overthrow of a dictator, or the descent of a dignified thing into the vulgar fray that takes place on the ground.

It was a clever argument to subvert women's emancipation to suggest that the workaday world was always less rewarding than domestic life. Anyone who felt otherwise, then, was not just reversing the natural order but had a disgusting appetite for business transactions. The artist Renoir claimed that the only job women should perform is "making the world tolerable."

In reality, power is shared between pedestal-occupiers and groundlings. Take it from our good friend Foucault. Every one of us has a pedestal to climb, dismount, demolish, or turn sideways.

Glass Slipper on the Other Foot

from The New York Times

Troy Duffy’s original Hollywood story was a fractured fairy tale. As recounted in the documentary “Overnight,” Mr. Duffy reacted to the instant success that came with a multimillion-dollar deal with Miramax for the thriller “The Boondock Saints” by abusing his friends, family and new corporate partner, doing it all on camera, and then alienating the filmmakers who had the footage. As Cinderellas go, he was the type who would smash the glass slipper and kick Princess Charming down the stairs. Yet a decade later the glass slipper is on the other foot.

A once-maligned film director--who went from rags to riches--is the object of two converging footwear metaphors. Since he's currently having the last laugh, the "shoe is on the other foot." And due to his "Cinderella" status, that shoe is the elusive "glass slipper."

But the glass slipper is the bit of evidence that leads the Prince back to Cinderella, not the girl's source of greatness or her reward in having been chosen. And working filmmakers surely opt for more comfortable shoes, right?

Hot Rockin'!

from Judas Priest's 1981 album "Point of Entry"

I wanna go
I wanna go
I wanna go
Hot rockin'!

"Hot rockin'" is more a state of mind than any particular activity. Rob Halford and company are seen hanging out in a sauna after some exercise (with titular hot rocks), and performing rock music while slowly being engulfed in flames. There is certainly also an innuendo involving testicles, which makes three separate meanings for the song's title.

Vague but cool-sounding idioms like "hot rockin'" are what make heavy metal so enduring in northern and eastern Europe--areas that can boast English fluency but not English mastery.

Full-Court Spruce-Up

from the Chicago Tribune

If the Olympics had come to Chicago, there would have been a full-court press to spruce up the area.

Blair Kamin is disappointed by his visit to Washington Park, site of a plan for a temporary Olympic stadium. As he sees it, a sports pageant would have been the best solution for cleaning broken glass and cracked sidewalks, so he offers the image of a team of basketball players in aggressive mode, armed with vacuum cleaners and feather dusters.

Ballers don't "spruce up," and neither do the real-estate jackals who salivated over Washington Park.

Marketing Ceasefire

from the blog Screen Machine

Almost everything that is beautiful eventually gets eaten up by capitalism, almost every moment of creative individuality becomes transformed into cultural capital, almost every struggle against homogeneity becomes a niche-marketing ceasefire.

In praise of the Chicago cable access program Chic-A-Go-Go, Australian critic Brad Nguyen disparages the cannibalistic arts industry. It's an admirable sentiment, but jumbled by "ceasefire." Nguyen probably means "open-fire" or "blitzkrieg" or something like that.

Unless a "ceasefire" means perfect, undisturbed conditions for selling art. Then it would be a "niche-marketing rookery." Nguyen's metaphor is cogent if warfare is being contrasted with art-dealing, but if he wants to liken warfare to art-dealing, then it isn't.

Broke as a Stone

from Sports Illustrated

"It's fine to wave the Olympic flag and get all gooey-eyed about girls tumbling," says Tom Tresser, a Chicago educator and organizer of the ad hoc group "No Games Chicago," who went to Switzerland in June to lobby the IOC against picking his hometown. "But the city is broke as a stone."

Olympic bid cities of course must agree to shoulder whatever cost overruns the Games may incur if they want to play host. Surely a worthwhile risk for Sochi. But Tresser asserts that Chicago can't afford it by inverting the cliché "stone-broke." Readers may associate stones with coldness or death before financial disadvantage.

Safire Sparkles On

Usage maven and MMM spiritual godfather William Safire died yesterday of pancreatic cancer. His final "On Language" column in the New York Times, printed mere days before his death, was sharp. An excerpt:

As an old Chinese philosopher never said, “Words about graphs are worth a thousand pictures.”

Boundaries of Human Intercourse

from a radio broadcast of FDR at the San Francisco World's Fair, 1939

As the boundaries of human intercourse are widened by giant strides of trade and travel, it is of vital import that the bonds of human understanding be maintained, enlarged and strengthened rapidly.

President Roosevelt was a master of the radio speech, and had a gift for winning the nation's confidence. Was it commerce or kinky sex that the president was calling for? All this talk of "intercourse," "giant strides," "bonds," "enlargement" and "rapid strengthening" seem off-color. FDR continues:

Unity of the Pacific nations is America's concern and responsibility . . . their onward progress deserves now a recognition that will be a stimulus as well. May this, America's World's Fair on the Pacific, in 1939, truly serve all nations in symbolizing their achievements of all the ages past . . . and in amalgamating their destinies . . . one with every other--through all the ages to come.

Maybe this erotic panacea could have come to fruition had it not been for the Axis powers.

Seven Types of Ambiguity

from William Empson's landmark work of literary criticism

Empson's fourth type of ambiguity deals with "alternative meanings [that] combine to make clear a complicated state of mind in the author."

This is a pretty good description of the task of this blog. Of course sometimes I infer a complicated state of mind out of a mere tic. After all, there are types of ambiguities, and ambiguities of type!

Slouching Toward Bethlehem

from a review in Double X

It pleases me so much to be 42 and have it seem like popular culture is actually interested in what it’s like to slouch toward the Bethlehem of middle age.

Elizabeth Wurtzel would love to see a show exploring sexuality and romance in women approaching middle age, but decides that ABC's Cougar Town falls short. To describe this time of life, Wurtzel borrows from William Butler Yeats' "The Second Coming."

This poem endures as one of the twentieth century's great expressions of anxiety. In the midst of modern upheavals, a sort of Messiah or Antichrist emerges from the desert. Just what havoc this "rough beast" will visit upon us is left unsaid, but it is almost certainly not the frustrations of turning forty.

Wurtzel is also invoking Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Joan Didion's 1968 volume of essays. That book is a testament of disaffection in California and more congruent to Wurtzel's declinist attitude. Didion's title essay exposes the Haight-Ashbury as a failed social experiment.

Didion herself somewhat muddles the Yeats reference. The poem reads "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" Is Didion suggesting an antichrist borne of lax morals? Her title's absent pronoun further complicates the metaphor: is it herself or us who are "slouching," rather than the "rough beast"?

"Slouching" can only be in one direction: downward. Hence Yeats' dark force must be an extraterrestrial entity that deigns to take human form. But the phrase now seems to carry a connotation of adult female dissatisfaction. Both Wurtzel and Didion have adapted an apocalyptic vision into a shorthand for their own private pathos.

The Period on the End of a Record

from VBS' Soft Focus with Ian Svenonius

Win at all costs, make sure you come through...every time one has to execute something, whether it be a pass, touchdown, you know, put the period on the end of a record, so to speak...I have my own special game. I haven't named it yet, but I'm always throwing touchdowns.

At 2:50, Jennifer Herrema of the band Royal Trux is asked if her enthusiasm for competitive sports influence her approach to music. It's a tough comparison, but she has fun with it. For a moment she leaves sports behind and borrows from grammar lessons to describe her creative approach. Sentences after all, must be punctuated in order to be legible (period).

It's an interesting sentiment because Royal Trux's greatness is wholly derived from their unfinished, spontaneous qualities. A fixation on completeness is not brought to bear on their early work.

Mississippi's Golden Bosom

from Langston Hughes' "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

Langston Hughes launched his reputation on this short poem which posits the speaker as an emissary for blacks throughout history. But anyone who has seen the Mississippi River knows that it doesn't change color when the sun goes down. The "muddy bosom" must then be some essence that yellows in the autumn, or it encompasses an entire landscape that surrounds the river.

Earthy spirituality or doggerel?

Gifts that Go on Costing

from A Trial by Jury, by D. Graham Burnett, page 181

[Jury duty] drew on all of me, and all of others, and we were bound by this. Life hands one few such episodes, and they are, in a way, gifts that go on costing.

The author of this memoir is an intellectual sucked out of the airy world of academe and into the role of jury foreman at a murder trial. His experience changes his life and rearranges his views on truth and justice.

Caught between remembering his service as burden or gift, Burnett splits the difference: not a "gift that goes on giving," but one that goes on "costing," that is, taxing him even after the verdict is reached.

Ring of Silence

from the Rukhnama, Section I, verse 278

The silence that arises from the tongue of centuries rings in my ears.

Saparmurat Niyazov, dead in 2006, was a man out of his time. The hypernationalistic president-for-life of Turkmenistan renamed the month of April after his mother. The Rukhnama was a collection of his spiritual ramblings, compulsory reading for all Turkmen students.

Even by the standards of totalitarian balderdash, this excerpt is a whopper. Dictator that he is, Niyazov claims to speak for all his people, even the dead. Assuming this burden actually is his, it is instructive to note that the avowed legacy of the Turkmens is...nothing. The "tongue of centuries" imparts "silence," and the sound of what it doesn't say manages to linger in Niyazov's mind.

Smile With English!

from the slogan of the Incheon Free English City Program

Smile with English!

The city of Incheon, South Korea has a program to encourage the English language for purely pragmatic reasons. In their haste to catch up to the global trade markets of Hong Kong and Singapore, the boosters overlooked that smiling has no language, and that it is not possible to speak English and smile at the same time. Shouldn't a language-oriented slogan be proofread extra carefully?

Outdating Automobile Society

from a TV interview with Frank Chu

...they are top secret by the CIA behind closed doors in Washington, outdating the automobile society, and outdating those international airlines...

At 2:20, Frank Chu summarizes his famous "12 Galaxies." These parallel worlds either "predate" cars and air traffic, or they "superannuate" them. If we take Chu as a media critic, he is describing a handcrafted world where people travel on foot and exchange secret information--some prelapsarian essence harnessed for evil by the government.

It seems reductive to slice Chu's thinking this thin. He is a feast of contradiction. The Bay Area protestor/performance artist appears without fail at every media circus with his indecipherable picket signs. He believes that he is an "unpaid movie star," the subject of a reality TV program called "The Richest Family." Chu blames Bill Clinton, and is on a "crusade for the first ever impeachment of a non-acting president."

Man Must Wak

from a storefront sign in downtown Oakland

MAN MUST WAK

Those of us unfamiliar with Nigerian pidgin can be forgiven for conflating that third word with "walk," "work," "wake," or even "whack." After all, man must do all these things. Thanks to Iroro O., though, we know that "wak" means "eat" or "get his grub on."

Deforestation For The Trees

from the New Yorker

So committed is [Colin] Beavan to his claim of zero impact that he can’t—or won’t—see the deforestation for the trees.

Elizabeth Kolbert criticizes the gimmicks of self-important authors. "No Impact Man" quixotically seeks to abstain from environmental damage. But to Kolbert his quest is myopic, and she deftly flips a shopworn metaphor into an ecological call-to-arms.

Not seeing "the forest for the trees" describes a way of not noticing how separate incidents are part of a pattern. The challenge of the environmentalist is to seize upon a harmful pattern and condemn it ASAP, before more damage is done. So although it is impossible to "see deforestation," that is the figurative task of the environmental movement.

Handle What's Between Your Ears

from Robert Palmer's "Hey Julia," Sneaking Sally Down the Alley

Hey, hey Julia, you're acting so peculiar
I know I'd never fool you in a million years
A horn section you resemble and your figure makes me tremble
And I sure would like to handle what's between your ears

It's that moment in a conversation when you're excited by someone not for their physicality but for their mind. But would you really want to sink your hands into Julia's gray matter, even if she reminded you of a horn section?

Coloured Views

from the Economist

Having Barack Obama in the White House may cause more people to pull their children out of public schools, predicts Mr Farris. Views of the government are coloured by views of the president, he says, even though the president has little control over education.

Our anonymous British summarizer ever so subtly suggests that racist paranoia is an impetus behind the rise of home schooling in these United States.

Tattered-Sounding Applause

from "The String Theory," by David Foster Wallace, Esquire

The applause of a tiny crowd is so small and sad and tattered-sounding that it’d almost be better if people didn’t clap at all.

Wallace was at his best when he confined himself to reportage. His very strong nonfiction relies on simple declarative sentences like this one with its funny, sad, unique observation. A "tatter" of course is a worn-out piece of cloth that has come to represent all things forlorn. The sound of tatters can be the same sound as insufficient clapping. Bravo, Dave. RIP.

Seeing With Their Heart

from Vin Scully's Los Angeles Dodgers broadcast, August 17

For a split second the crowd was seeing things with their heart.

The fans gave a whoop when their man hit a high fly ball that was eventually caught. Scully turned this beautiful phrase, which is evidence of why he is the only baseball announcer who calls both play-by-play and color commentary by himself. All the souls in Dodger Stadium share one "heart," and this heart is capable of conjuring the pictures that it wants to see.

Mushrooming Cancer

from Al Jazeera

Hussein Shobokshi, a Saudi columnist, said the US, which has been worried about al-Qaeda activity in Yemen, "did not pay attention to what was happening in Yemen or at the same time what's developing in Somalia...the region as a whole is looking at a mushrooming cancer in both these countries, and things are slowly but surely getting out of hand."

Shobokshi's usage of the verb "to mushroom" is correct, but it is confusing to think of cancer as fungal, and possibly also misleading to think of Shia militiamen as forming a geopolitical "cancer."

It's probably not helpful to suggest that if this portobello metastasizes, then Gazprom could control the world's most valuable oil supplies. Then, things would definitely be "out of hand."

Illuminate the Cadence

from "The Dead" by James Joyce

The voice, made plaintive by distance and by the singer's hoarseness, faintly illuminated the cadence of the air with words expressing grief.

This lovely Joyce passage is a synesthetic description of singing. "Illuminated" would suggest visual clarification, not audial. Then, "cadence" shows up, which is a musical term meaning "rhythm" that seems to disagree with "the air," unless we take the musical definition of "air," which is a synonym for "tune."

The jumble of terms and meanings echoes the skipped heartbeat that occurs when we hear great music.

Thanks to Arthur Phillips for wrestling with this sentence before me.

Intendances

from Steven C. Stewart's Forward to movie (Crispin Glover's film It is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE)

I have never killed anyone and never intend too. However, I have taken many intendances from my own life and built the story around them.

Stewart is a severely handicapped screenwriter who here parses the problem of the origin of artistic creation. It is not clear if he meant "intentions" or "incidence." So it is thus unclear if the basis of the film is real events, or Stewart's mere wishes. But instead of confusing his meaning, the portmanteau artfully describes how fiction can be based on a writer's life.

2+2=3

from The Economist

[Raul Castro] was blunt about Cuba's economic problems...he blamed “our own shortcomings” for the fact that “often two plus two results in three.”

It's possible that Castro only meant that it's difficult to manage the budget of a Caribbean nation, but this utterance looks to me like a clever and literary riff on state communism. It's a sardonic reference to Orwell's 1984, where the main character is forced by a totalitarian government to agree that two and two make five.

"2+2=5" has become a worn-out trope, visible all over pop culture, signifying something about either looming mind control or resistance to logical thinking. Castro revives the cliché and rhetorically pronounces the end of international socialism.